If you're looking for bad news about Microsoft, top tip: look away now

Satya's on several cloud nines – as in, billions of dollars

Microsoft's boss Satya Nadella march into the cloud seems to be paying off for the Windows 10 and Office 365 giant: on Thursday, the biz announced its sales for Q3 2018 jumped 16 per cent.

For the quarter ending March 31, the third of Redmond's 2018 fiscal year, can be summarized thus:

Revenues of $26.8bn were up 16 per cent from $23.1bn in Q3 2017. This includes $9.92bn, up 13 per cent, year on year, from personal computing stuff: Windows, Surface and similar hardware, gaming, and search ads.

Net income was $7.42bn, a 35 per cent increase from $5.49bn a year ago.

Earnings per share of $0.95 were up 36 per cent from the year-ago quarter and ahead of the $0.85 estimate given by analysts.

Commercial cloud, a group that includes Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics 365 made $6bn in revenues, up 58 per cent from $3.8bn in the year-ago quarter. Azure alone grew revenues by 93 per cent, which is a little down from the 98 per cent figure in the previous quarter.

LinkedIn revenues of $1.33bn were up 37 per cent from $976m last year.

The soaring Azure et al revenues will be welcome news to Nadella, who has pushed a move into cloud since taking over for Steve Ballmer, who decided to transition from volatile CEO to volatile sports owner. Nadella's cloud-centric campaign has included a major re-org of Microsoft's business units to focus on cloud services.

"We took significant steps this quarter to put (cloud) at the forefront of everything we do," Nadella told analysts on a conference call.

Investors were happy with the numbers as well as Redmond's strong guidance to the end of the year. In after-hours trading, Microsoft shares were trading at $96, up 1.75 per cent. ®